Little Kitty, Big City: How a former Half-Life dev’s game for his kids became an overnight success

gamesindustry.biz:

Without a doubt, one of May's surprise hit games has been Little Kitty, Big City. Released on May 9, the wholesome adventure game about a cat looking for its way home has been massively successful, selling over 100,000 units within the first 48 hours of release, and garnering over a million plays on Game Pass. As of this writing, it also continues to hold strong among the top five downloadable titles on the Nintendo eShop.

The remarkably warm reception has been equally surprising to its developer, the newly formed Double Dagger Studio, helmed by Matt T. Wood.

Wood, whose game development career began at 3D Realms in the late '90s, spent over 16 years at Valve before deciding to break away and form his own company. Double Dagger Studio arose from his desire to challenge himself in new ways as a game developer.

"It was a super tough decision," he says. "Valve was a really great place to be, and going out on your own was a huge risk to take, but it was worth it to be able to have new challenges and try new things. I wanted to bring something new to the industry, work with some new people, all these different things."

Going out on his own also gave Wood more free time to spend with his three kids, who acted as sounding boards for his game ideas. He'd done several prototypes and experiments, but one idea that seemed to strike a chord with all of them was a game concept where you played as a cat.

"I made a really quick prototype, made a video, put it online, and it kind of blew up," he says. "I was like, 'Wow, people seem to really be interested in this. Maybe I should focus on it more.' That was kind of the start of it."

Expressing oneself as a cat, doing things as a cat, and seeing things through the eyes of a cat were interesting concepts, but the next question that arose was what exactly the player was supposed to do as a cat? What could be the game's objective?

"The concept could be anything," says Wood. "You can go in a direction that might be interesting game